To gather insights on the current and future state of open-source software (OSS), we talked to 31 executives. This is nearly double the number we speak to for a research guide and believe this reiterates the popularity of, acceptance of, and demand for OSS.

We began by asking, "What does your company use open-source software to accomplish?" Here's what they told us:

Big Data

Open-source software is at the very core of Lucidworks' products and our business. We use it for everything from our search technology to machine learning and everything in between. Open source has been a major innovation accelerator across the entire technology sector and we expect that to continue.

Talend uses Apache Open Source as a foundation for its big data integration tools. Apache projects such as Beam are at the core of Talend’s cloud and big data integration platform.

data Artisans was founded by the original creators of Apache Flink, and the company is committed to ensuring that Flink remains the best open-source stream processing framework.

Boundless provides an open geographic information systems (GIS) platform built upon best-of-breed open-source projects. This GIS platform enables users to visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends in their location data.

DataTorrent is an open software company that enables real-time streaming analytics to help customers achieve business outcomes with low time to market. DataTorrent provides a fast big data stack using best of breed open source technologies that are hardened and integrated. DataTorrent is the creator of Apache Apex, a real-time streaming platform.

Database

YugaByte both uses open-source software as well as produces open-source software, so we are on both sides of the spectrum. YugaByte is building a cloud-native database similar to Azure CosmosDB, and it is open source. We use open-source software to build our code, run tests, and deploy the software among other things. We also run load balancers to front end-user queries as well as to analyze data internally.

ScyllaDB provides an Apache-Cassandra compatible NoSQL data store that handles one million transactions per second on a single server.

Automation

Chef has been at the nexus of modern open-source software development with the automation of IT infrastructure. In addition to being involved in open-source as a vendor for the last ten years, our founders and many employees have been open-source contributors or maintainers since the very early days of the Internet.

SaaS

Platform9 is a SaaS-managed hybrid cloud enabling clients to deploy, manage, and maintain open-source software as a service.

Storage

Platforms

Qt provides a complete software development framework for connected devices.

Camunda is a developer-oriented open-source platform for workflow and decision automation. We embed many different open-source libraries in our product, most of them licensed under Apache or MIT.

Fastly uses open-source software in every nearly every portion of our edge cloud platform — from the frameworks that we use to develop our browser-based applications down to the lowest levels of the server operating systems and network.

Testing

Sauce Labs is built around the idea of an open interface. We provide an automated testing service that allows customers to verify their web and mobile native applications work correctly across a wide range of browsers, phones, etc. using open-source testing protocols (i.e. Selenium and Appium).

Other

We use Golang and AngularJS as our development languages, and we use Bolt DB as the internal DB engine inside Portainer.io containers.

CA Veracode provides application security for the entire application lifecycle and landscape and 90-95% of applications are built with open-source code.

Instaclustr’s business relies completely on open-source software. Our core business is operating open-source software (managed services) for customers who depend on it for their organizations — and, often, the application customers run on our services is their whole business.

TIBCO uses open-source software in various IT capacities in business and user-facing applications, but from a software development perspective, we leverage open-source software as a foundation for building our technologies.

EPAM is engineering the digital future. Writing code for full spectrum applications to solve business problems.

npm runs the world’s largest registry of reusable open source software, and we maintain the software that developers use to install and combine those modules of code. Every day, about two-thirds of the world’s JavaScript developers use npm to combine open source code in new ways.

Flexera uses open-source software in order to get best-of-breed software and components everywhere from our testing frameworks all the way to the components we build into our software and the operating systems we use. Open source makes up to 50% of the products we build and allows us to concentrate on functionality that makes our products different.

DreamHost web hosting probably wouldn't exist if not for open source. Our whole infrastructure depends on Linux and GNU tools, Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, MySQL, WordPress, Let's Encrypt, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph to name only the most prominent names.